History Against Misery
”David Roediger is renowned for his brilliant writings on whiteness, but few readers acknowledge what lay at the root of his work: his abiding hatred of
all forms of oppression and exploitation. If you didn't know this before, History Against Misery ought to make it clear, for Roediger has put
together a powerful collection of rants and chants against miserabilism, and a surrealist road map to liberated futures. This is one of those books we
must keep close to us as we struggle to overthrow misery once and for all.“
— Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical
Imagination (2002)
“An exquisite corpus of work! Like any great history, Roediger's work is an act of rescue and restoration. The words, acts and deeds have always
been out there, and here he meticulously gathers and reconstructs for us what has been willfully overlooked and disappeared. It is to the summer of our
discontent that the surrealist brings us a wintry elation: humor, a poetics of resistance, purposeful deviance motivated by genuine compassion and love
of truth.”
— Blake Schwarzenbach, musician/writer
“History Against Misery comes at a critical moment in the field of race studies. David Roediger is one of the most formative progressive cultural
critics in the U.S. today. With characteristic originality, lucidity, and wit, he illuminates the complexity underlying capitalism, white supremacy, and
commonsense notions of popular categories such as labor, sport, art, and education. The collection is bold, thoughtful, disturbing, stimulating, and timely.”
—C.L. Cole, Professor, University of Illinois, Editor, Journal of Sport & Social Issues
“This wonderful collection of essays is not only a powerful indictment of late capitalism—the system that ’dulls and narrows
human desire’—but also a fascinating survey of resistance voices, from the IWW to the Surrealists, from the ‘Chicago Idea’ Anarchists to Black Liberation. David
Roediger persuasively shows that revel poetry, free imagination, workers' direct action and Black freedom struggles are all part of the same great
movement against the established order and its (miserable) ideology of ‘whiteness’”
— Michael Lowy, author of On Changing the World: Essays
in Political Philosophy, from Karl Marx to Walter Benjamin (1993)
Chicago: Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company, 2005
ISBN: 9780882863054